


A Name, A Face, A Serial Number

by TehanuFromEarthsea



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Love thine enemy, Role models run amok, Who is Phasma?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-23
Updated: 2017-01-23
Packaged: 2018-09-19 12:50:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9441104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TehanuFromEarthsea/pseuds/TehanuFromEarthsea
Summary: “We should know our enemy,” Phasma has said more than once to her training pod leader. “By understanding them, we can defeat them.”What could it hurt, to study the military failures of the past? They are old history now.This file is different. It is an image file. For the first time she sees the face of the shadow she’s been tracking through a dozen data archives.*       *       *





	

Phasma is determined to be the best. It is not enough to be tall, to be striking, to prove herself faster and stronger than the other trainee stormtroopers, though she has done that over and over again. 

She has a keen mind, and knows she must train it as hard as she trains her body.

She will earn her name, _Phasma,_ though she has been called PH-4534 all the life she can remember.

Except for that little bit, that time when she had another name. She was not a baby when she came to the First Order. There are memories. Life on a planet. Being held. Food in earthenware bowls. Soft voices like music. 

It does no good to remember. It will only hold her back, her teachers tell her.

That is why her memories were wiped. What remains are only fragments, things that might have happened to somebody else.

Sometimes she studies too hard, and the fierce desire to learn morphs into something that is maybe shameful within the First Order. 

Curiosity.

She’s been told all her life that the New Republic and the Resistance are scum, liars, a threat to the galaxy, and soon to be defeated.  But the mirage of defeating the New Republic grows no closer. Millions follow them. 

_Why?_

“We should know our enemy,” she has said more than once to her training pod leader. “By understanding them, we can defeat them.”

She’s set herself a study topic: the attack on the first Death Star. History fascinates her, maybe more than it should. She’s read all the reports, hunted down security footage. 

 _Scarif_ ….she should look that up. What happened there? The Death Star plans were leaked…

She pushes her hands across her forehead, kneading out the tiredness. Calls up a file. It’s a good thing the intelligence archives were never kept on Scarif, or there’d be little to read from those times.

 _Suspects._  

The file route is complex, drawing on archives far away across the space lanes. That she’s old enough now to call on them is a matter of pride. 

While she waits for them to download, she goes to the common room, tiptoeing past the other sleeping trainees. She returns to her cubicle with a bottle of hot water, which she sips slowly, watching her screen.

_Cassian Andor._

She’s seen this name before. It has come up in other contexts. Phasma’s been building up a picture of this man. She’s almost certain he played a key role, both in the attack on Scarif and in numerous other rebel actions before that. 

This file is different. It is an image file. For the first time she sees the face of the shadow she’s been tracking through a dozen data archives.

He’s much younger than she imagined for such a hardened operative. She checks the date: he could not even have been in his teens when he first came to the attention of the Empire’s intelligence network. His name is attached to a daring and imaginative attack on an Empire courier route.

What strikes her the most is what a sad face it is. Gentle, almost. It seems incredible that he could have such softness if what she suspects about him is true. But there it is. A delicate mouth, smiling. Eyes that look world-weary even as they crinkle at the corners. He’s been caught full-face, speaking to a person who has their back to the security camera. His eyes are dark, clearly outlined by thick lashes. Liquid eyes, dark as kaf. 

What is she thinking? She’s just thirsty, that’s all. She takes another sip of hot water. When she graduates from this trainee level, she’ll be entitled to kaf from the commissary.

 

  *         *           *



 

Over the next nights Phasma works on an essay examining the critical flaws in the first Death Star, and the links between its destruction and the prior attack on Scarif. All the big names are there of course, the Organas, the Skywalkers, Saw Gerrera. Their connections are well understood, as are their conflicts.

 _Cassian Andor._ There he was again, talking to Bail Organa in a restaurant. A seemingly casual conversation, but Phasma’s research suggests it was nothing of the kind.

A much younger photo. Late teens. A thin and somehow cheerful face, before those tired-looking creases started to form under his eyes. He’d been caught loitering near the sabotage of a munitions plant. Djen D’akir was the identity he had, that time. Here he was, staring at the imager with innocent good humour. He was released just after the picture was taken.

If Phasma’s detective work is correct, he’d killed three security guards minutes before he was detained, and blown up the main planetside hypercomm relay almost as soon as the stormtroopers booted him out the door of their station.

Hypercomm transmission logs, shuttle timetables, cargo manifests, spaceport logbooks. She scrolls through them, tagging and filing notes. 

When her hands are free, she finds herself doodling with her stylus. _Cassian Andor._ There he is again, on an image she’s saved behind the documents she’s working on. His nose and mouth quite aristocratic in this long-ago moment, his eyebrows making firm lines like wings above those intense eyes. 

She tries to copy the outlines of his face with her stylus, and then sketch the changes that come over his face when he smiles. A cold-blooded killer with crow’s feet of laughter. His cheeks lift into high half circles when he is amused. 

He must have betrayed many, with that charm. She looks at another picture. Here his eyes have a lazy droop, but she knows they miss nothing. She expands the image to stare into them.

_Would you notice me, if I were following you?_

Phasma hands in the essay. She gets top marks, as usual. 

Soon she’s a full stormtrooper in the accelerated officer training programme. There isn’t much time for anything outside of her curriculum. 

Except when she’s on guard duty. Those endless hours of standing to attention, alertly defending nothing in particular - a stretch of corridor, a door - are thought to be good for a stormtrooper’s soul. A hardening of the will to endure discomfort, a deepening of submission to the spirit of the collective. It will be many years before she’s promoted past this kind of duty.

Phasma populates the empty corridors with her imagination. A young Cassian Andor on the run from an outraged shopkeeper, eating the spoils of his theft as he dodges and hides. He must have been streetwise very young, she reasons. Was he abandoned? What did he do to survive? 

He meets Leia Organa, is seduced by her blazing eyes and political fervour. Phasma imagines that meeting with all the shades of meaning in “seduce”.

Leia was never a beauty in the classical sense, but there is something about her vivid presence that draws the eye. Her swift, sure hands on a blaster are something Phasma can admire. Every time she watches footage of Leia, her heart springs to attention somehow. It doesn’t mean anything. Or if it does, then it’s just a shame Leia was a leader for the wrong side. Nothing to be done about that. In the present, she’s General Organa, a spider weaving webs of misfortune for the First Order. 

Phasma imagines a young Leia teaching Cassian to assemble a blaster. Or maybe he teaches her.  While Phasma’s standing to attention guarding some random deck of the Finalizer, there’s plenty of time for her to picture it both ways. She pieces together the actions she suspects him of taking part in. Daring rescues, near-misses, escapes. It was quite a life. In her daydreams, his face is clearly defined. The stormtroopers he fights are a blank mass of white. Not really the same as her comrades.

She used to see the men in her squad sometimes in rare unguarded moments with their eyes softening in that same way she sees in Cassian’s pictures. Their cheeks curling into lines of laughter. But lately she’s been promoted beyond the point that they will relax around her. She has space and privacy in her own cabin of the Finalizer. Beyond its confines she wears her helmet and they wear theirs. It is difficult to tell what anyone is thinking, if indeed she ever knew.

It’s innocent enough to fantasise about him. Enemy or not, he’s long dead. Gone into a blaze of plasma, one with the universe. On the wrong side, but triumphant. It would be small-minded of Phasma to deny that, and she has a horror of being petty.

She wonders if he died alone.

Eyewitness accounts of that last day on Scarif are understandably rare. Phasma realises that anyone left alive who had seen anything was shot as punishment for not having done enough to stop the rebels. Or for not having the grace to die with their comrades. Sometimes, being the only surviving member of a squad is a mark of shame, not heroism. 

Now she’s been promoted, she has better access to certain historic records. She is not surprised to recognise some of the names. The staff-wielding blind monk is surely Chirrut Imwe, and no doubt his sidekick Baze Malbus was there too. They were always on the periphery of trouble on Jedha, always too clever or lucky to be caught doing anything incriminating. Easy to join the dots in hindsight, but what good was that?

That bloody pilot, of course. That was well-known. She looks at the file holo of him. Big eyes like a startled deer. He looks utterly unlikely to cause the kind of trouble he did end up causing.

Jyn Erso. Daughter of that viper in the heart of the Death Star, Galen. Phasma has seen her name in a dozen reports before, usually describing a person who’d disappeared before suspicions could harden. She’d been caught at last and sent to prison on Wobani. Rescued by the Rebels before she could be incarcerated.

Phasma opens the image file and stares at the holos. She catches her breath. It’s the same feeling she had when she’d first seen Cassian Andor. 

So young! Baby-faced, even. What had this been, a rebellion of children? 

Phasma leans forward for a better look. She is alone in her cabin during the dead shift hour, and the only light is that which pours out of the holopad, out of Jyn’s heart-shaped face.  Phasma is mesmerised by the long-dead woman’s gaze. She has the thousand-metre stare of a blooded warrior, but it is something more than that. 

Phasma scrolls through more files and sees Jyn, like Cassian, caught in fleeting moments by security cameras across half a sector. Always she moves with the sure definition of a durasteel blade, always alert, her poise hinting at unguessed reserves of strength. 

She is beautiful and lethal in every way Phasma aspires to be. 

Phasma makes a tally of people that Jyn Erso had probably or certainly killed. Her fingers stray to the stylus on her desk. Almost unconsciously she sketches swift lines: Jyn Erso at speed, turning to fire, flinging herself into space. 

Phasma’s talent for drawing is one she has kept for herself. It is of no use to the First Order, therefore she keeps it as a private pleasure. A way to relax. 

She doesn’t question why she likes to draw one of the most hated women in First Order history. All she knows is that she’s found a fitting match for Cassian Andor. Now she can fill her spare time with stories of how they met. (Nobody knows when they met, so Phasma can imagine anything she likes). She populates the corridors of the Finalizer with long tales of their adventures together. 

The grey walls recede, become a windy beach on Lah’mu. A child runs along the margins of the ocean. Director Krennic comes for her, but she escapes by a hundred different methods. Wide-eyed and wily, she picks up a blaster and fires. A crack shot, by all accounts. 

Phasma wonders if Jyn missed her parents. She hopes she didn’t waste her life seeking revenge for something that couldn’t be undone. It’s not something Phasma herself would do.

_After all, I lost my parents too. You don’t see me running around trying to avenge myself on the world because of that!_

Sometimes she smiles inside her helmet as she snaps to attention for some passing officer. General Hux has no idea that an imaginary Jyn and Cassian await him, blasters drawn, in the cross-corridor beside Phasma’s post.

In the end Phasma’s promotion to Captain doesn’t require the death of any of her superior officers, imaginary or otherwise. She gets there by sheer talent and determination.

There is no time now for daydreams. She has her own squads to train. She feels more visible now, and fears that somebody will see beneath her helmet to the riot of rebel histories hiding in her skull. 

That new one, the leader of the Knights of Ren. No telling what he sees. Or what he keeps hidden behind that mask of his.

What a team they were, though, her rebels! She tries to mould her squad of stormtroopers into something she imagined Jyn and Cassian’s group might have been: loyal, brave, quick-thinking and adaptable. 

It pays off: Phasma’s success with the stormtroopers she trains is noticed, and she’s promoted to Leading Captain. The ceremony is conducted on a dais in one of the landing bays. A sea of white armour moves as one before her. The massed sound of their feet as they come to attention booms through the vast spaces.

“Nobody’s worked harder for this,” says General Hux as he hands over the Leading Captain’s pips. Phasma salutes, and suppresses thoughts of how she modelled her team on the rebel squads she’s studied. It’s not safe. Not with that mind-reading freak in black, Kylo Ren, standing at Hux’s shoulder. She concentrates instead on the stormtroopers that have helped her career. Some of the new ones coming along, like FN-2187, are a testament to the success of her methods, people say. 

“Captain Phasma!” Hux announces to the multitude, and she turns to acknowledge the crowd. Now they all know her secret name. _Phasma._ Who until today had existed only in her mind, running down alleyways with Cassian and Jyn on a dozen worlds. Throwing bombs and stealing spaceships and drinking and laughing and sharing secrets until late into the night, afterwards.

A round-faced junior officer shows Phasma her new office. It’s all hers. She settles into the chair, adjusts it to her height, and gives it a twirl. She’s pleased.

This is the life she has trained for.

A gritty little cough in the doorway makes her do a complete spin around. It’s Hux, of course. Nobody else makes that sound. There is a look of contempt on his pasty face. Of course, she knows how she looks, twirling around in her chair. One can’t afford to relax for a moment.

She unfolds slowly to her full height, salutes, and fixes him with a cold stare. “Yes?”

He hands her a small grey datapad and a flimsy. She glances at it and he explains. “Access codes. Memorise them.”

Phasma nods and takes the pad. New responsibilities. So much to learn. She is ready.

It is not until much later - alone in her room (but when is she ever anything except alone?) that she takes the datapad and lets her fingers dance over the keys, calling up files and menus. What is she doing? She dare not think. She needs to know everything about the trainees in her charge. It is allowed, surely. Otherwise these files would be barred to her.

The stormtrooper programme is healthy. It is successful. The trainees are taken from many worlds. It is all on file.

Designations. Date of acquisition. Planets and cities of origin.

Families of origin.

Parents.

She types in a designation.

_Query?  PH-4534_

She does not know she is holding her breath as the pixels dance in front of her, searching the First Order’s orderly filing system. Only a moment.

_Date: 1 BBY_

_Planet of Origin: Onderon_

Strange to think I come from the same planet as Saw Gerrera, she thinks.

_Family: Sa’seian and Norbug Gerrera._

What? Is this a fantasy? Phasma can only boggle at the screen. It’s nonsense. There’s no way she can be related to Saw Gerrera. She’s a ghost, phantom-white, compared to him.

Only after a minute does she notice the small tag signalling a note appended to this file. With a trembling finger she touches the screen. It requests one of Phasma’s codes, one of the high security clearances she received earlier. She taps in the numbers robotically, not allowing herself to think. A smaller screen opens up.

_Stormtrooper designate PH-4534 taken as a spite-offering from her foster family, who no longer wish to hold her. They offer her in surety of their severance of all familial connection from the wanted criminal Saw Gerrera._

The language is archaic. It makes no sense. Phasma shakes her head. _Spite offering?_

She goes to call up a search for Onderon familial customs, but notices a flashing green cursor at the bottom of the screen. She touches it absently.

Another screen.

_PH-4534 given to Gerrera family at birth._

_PH-4534 Birth Mother_ **_Jyn Erso._ **

There it is, the face of her mother. The heart-shaped, light-filled face of her mother. Achingly young, her lips parted, ready to speak a word her daughter will never hear. 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Welp, not sure if this is the start of something bigger or not.


End file.
